Derby; Sunday, 23 July, 2023
Breakfast completed I packed up my bag, checked out and headed up to Derby station to catch the train north to Chesterfield.
I was meeting up with a friend who lives up in this part of the country to head over to Chatsworth House – perhaps the premier stately home in the UK, and part of that empire that Bess of Hardwick helped create.
My friend met me at the station and we drove out into the Derbyshire peaks over towards Chatsworth, stopping off at the Estate farm shop for a coffee as the traffic was so light due to the weather, and then on down to the Devonshire Arms at Pilsley in the heart of the estate for a very nice pub lunch.
Lunch completed we headed over to Chatsworth House to have a look around both the house and the gardens. Our timing was impeccable with the tour of the house coinciding with a particularly extended shower which finished just before we headed into the gardens to have a wander round, with at times there even being sunshine and patches of blue sky.
After a very pleasant wander around the gardens we stopped for coffee in the stable block before my friend drove me back to Newark Northgate station to pick up the train into London from there.
The previous evening LNER had texted me to say that the train I was booked onto, with an inflexible Advanced ticket, had been cancelled, so my ticket had been upgraded to open and I could catch any train within a reasonable window of my original service – which meant when we arrived back at Newark about 25 minutes before my originally booked service I was able to hop onto the train that arrived just 5 minutes later.
To add to the run of good luck this train only stopped at Peterborough and ended up arriving in London 40 minutes earlier than originally planned and whilst on the train I even got an email from LNER confirming that because my booked train had been cancelled they were refunding me the full cost of the ticket.
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